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- The BioVisualSpeech corpus of words with sibilants for speech therapy games developmentPublication . Cavaco, Sofia; Guimarães, Isabel; Ascensão, Mariana; Abad, Alberto; Anjos, Ivo; Oliveira, Francisco; Martins, Sofia; Marques, Nuno; Eskenazi, Maxine; Magalhães, João; Grilo, Ana MargaridaAbstract: In order to develop computer tools for speech therapy that reliably classify speech productions, there is a need for speech production corpora that characterize the target population in terms of age, gender, and native language. Apart from including correct speech productions, in order to characterize the target population, the corpora should also include samples from people with speech sound disorders. In addition, the annotation of the data should include information on the correctness of the speech productions. Following these criteria, we collected a corpus that can be used to develop computer tools for speech and language therapy of Portuguese children with sigmatism. The proposed corpus contains European Portuguese children’s word productions in which the words have sibilant consonants. The corpus has productions from 356 children from 5 to 9 years of age. Some important characteristics of this corpus, that are relevant to speech and language therapy and computer science research, are that (1) the corpus includes data from children with speech sound disorders; and (2) the productions were annotated according to the criteria of speech and language pathologists, and have information about the speech production errors. These are relevant features for the development and assessment of speech processing tools for speech therapy of Portuguese children. In addition, as an illustration on how to use the corpus, we present three speech therapy games that use a convolutional neural network sibilants classifier trained with data from this corpus and a word recognition module trained on additional children data and calibrated and evaluated with the collected corpus.
- Protocolo de Avaliação Orofacial: revisão e validação da versão 2 (PAOF-2) em crianças dos quatro aos nove anosPublication . Guimarães, Isabel; Teixeira, Paulo; Raimundo, Ana Filipa; Miguel, Susana; Nobre, Helena; Ascensão, MarianaObjetivos: Descrever o processo de revisão do protocolo de avaliação orofacial (PAOF) e determinar a praticabilidade, fidedignidade e validade da segunda versão (PAOF-2). Métodos: Estudo metodológico, observacional e transversal que envolveu duas fases, revisão e validação. A fase de revisão incluiu a análise dos conteúdos do PAOF (dimensões, itens, escala de avaliação e forma de registo) seguido de validação de conteúdo em grupo focal e pré-teste. Na fase de validação, o PAOF-2 foi aplicado, por terapeutas da fala, a crianças com idades entre os quatro e os nove anos. Foram analisadas as propriedades clinimétricas de praticabilidade (tempo de aplicação), fidedignidade (consistência interna e acordo intra- e inter-examinadores) e validade (construto, convergente e discriminativa). Resultados: A revisão resultou num instrumento com duas dimensões ‘Estrutura’ e ‘Mobilidade’, 47 itens, escala de cinco pontos e folha de registo. A validade de conteúdo do PAOF foi analisada por 13 terapeutas da fala. A validação realizada em 312 crianças indicou praticabilidade adequada (15 minutos de tempo médio de aplicação), consistência interna excelente a boa (Alfa de Cronbach entre 0,94 e 0,77), excelente fidedignidade intra- e inter-examinadores (Coeficiente de correlação intraclasse >0,75), validade de construto (a análise fatorial exploratória explica 71,4% da estrutura interna do PAOF-2 com 47 itens), boa a moderada validade convergente entre o PAOF-2 e o original e validade discriminativa na dimensão ‘Mobilidade’ de acordo com a idade. Conclusão: O PAOF-2 é um instrumento prático, fidedigno e válido com potencialidade para instrumento de avaliação orofacial de crianças entre os quatro e os nove anos de idade.
- A serious mobile game with visual feedback for training sibilant consonantsPublication . Anjos, Ivo; Grilo, Ana Margarida; Ascensão, Mariana; Guimarães, Isabel; Magalhães, João; Cavaco, SofiaAbstract. The distortion of sibilant sounds is a common type of speech sound disorder (SSD) in Portuguese speaking children. Speech and language pathologists (SLP) frequently use the isolated sibilants exercise to assess and treat this type of speech errors. While technological solutions like serious games can help SLPs to motivate the children on doing the exercises repeatedly, there is a lack of such games for this specic exercise. Another important aspect is that given the usual small number of therapy sessions per week, children are not improving at their maximum rate, which is only achieved by more intensive therapy. We propose a serious game for mobile platforms that allows children to practice their isolated sibilants exercises at home to correct sibilant distortions. This will allow children to practice their exercises more frequently, which can lead to faster improvements. The game, which uses an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system to classify the child sibilant productions, is controlled by the child's voice in real time and gives immediate visual feedback to the child about her sibilant productions. In order to keep the computation on the mobile platform as simple as possible, the game has a client-server architecture, in which the external server runs the ASR system. We trained it using raw Mel frequency cepstral coe cients, and we achieved very good results with an accuracy test score of above 91% using support vector machines.
- A model for sibilant distortion detection in childrenPublication . Anjos, Ivo; Grilo, Ana Margarida; Ascensão, Mariana; Guimarães, Isabel; Magalhães, João; Cavaco, SofiaThe distortion of sibilant sounds is a common type of speech sound disorder in European Portuguese speaking children. Speech and language pathologists (SLP) use different types of speech production tasks to assess these distortions. One of these tasks consists of the sustained production of isolated sibilants. Using these sound productions, SLPs usually rely on auditory perceptual evaluation to assess the sibilant distortions. Here we propose to use an isolated sibilant machine learning model to help SLPs assessing these distortions. Our model uses Mel frequency cepstral coefficients of the isolated sibilant phones and it was trained with data from 145 children. The analysis of the false negatives detected by the model can give insight into whether the child has a sibilant production distortion. We were able to confirm that there exist some relation between the model classification results and the distortion assessment of professional SLPs. Approximately 66% of the distortion cases identified by the model are confirmed by an SLP as having some sort of distortion or are perceived as being the production of a different sound.
- The BioVisualSpeech european portuguese sibilants corpusPublication . Grilo, Ana Margarida; Guimarães, Isabel; Ascensão, Mariana; Abad, Alberto; Anjos, Ivo; Magalhães, João; Cavaco, SofiaAbstract. The development of reliable speech therapy computer tools that automatically classify speech productions depends on the quality of the speech data set used to train the classi cation algorithms. The data set should characterize the population in terms of age, gender and native language, but it should also have other important properties that characterize the population that is going to use the tool. Thus, apart from including samples from correct speech productions, it should also have samples from people with speech disorders. Also, the annotation of the data should include information on whether the phonemes are correctly or wrongly pronounced. Here, we present a corpus of European Portuguese children's speech data that we are using in the development of speech classi ers for speech therapy tools for Portuguese children. The corpus includes data from children with speech disorders and in which the labelling includes information about the speech production errors. This corpus, which has data from 356 children from 5 to 9 years of age, focuses on the European Portuguese sibilant consonants and can be used to train speech recognition models for tools to assist the detection and therapy of sigmatism.
- Speech sounds data for typically developing european portuguese children 6-9 years oldPublication . Guimarães, Isabel; Ascensão, Mariana; Grilo, Ana MargaridaPurposes: To identify the European Portuguese (EP) speech sounds competence in children. Methods: A total of 240 children between 6 and 9;11 years old named 37 pictures. Gender and age effect as well as the age limit for EP speech sound mastery were analyzed. The percentage of consonants correct (PCC) were determined. The criteria used were PCC ≥75% (acquired sound) and ≥90% (mastered sound). Results: No gender effect for speech sound development was found in the studied age range. Children with older ages [8-9;11] showed a slightly significant mean performance than younger ages [6-7;11]. The girls appeared to reach higher mean competence than boys; however, gender effect did not reach significance. At the [6-6;11] years old age range all plosives (except the word-medial /t/ and /g/), four fricatives (/f/, /v/, word-initial /ʃ/ and word-medial /Ʒ/) and two laterals (word-medial /r/ and word-initial and medial /R/) are mastered. The other targeted sounds are mastered either at the [7-7;11] or at the [8-8;11] year old range. Conclusion: The EP targeted speech sounds are mastered between 6 and 8;11 years old.